A Study in Charlotte

She gave me a feral look. “I only needed one.”

The lock clicked open. She jerked me inside. The door slammed shut behind us.

WHEN HOLMES HAD FIRST MENTIONED THE SCHOOL’S TUNNEL system to me, I’d had trouble wrapping my head around it. A network of passages below campus, connecting Sherringford’s buildings underground? I’d done some digging to find out more.

By digging, I mean that I’d turned around in my desk chair and asked Tom, my personal font of useless information, what the deal was.

Legend has it the tunnels had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, back when Sherringford was still a convent school. When the grounds were under a few feet of snow, the nuns used these heated passages to get from their quarters to prayers at dawn and vespers. These days, Tom said, the tunnels were used by the maintenance workers who took care of our dorms. There were boilers down there and supply closets. Every entrance to the tunnels was only accessible via key code, and those codes changed every month. I’d told Tom about how disappointed I was that the tunnels weren’t used as Cold War bomb shelters or by moonshine smugglers or something equally interesting, and he’d grinned at me. Even better, he’d said. The codes changed so often because students were always bribing janitors for them—the access tunnels were one of the only private places to hook up on campus.

Holmes, I knew, used the tunnels to practice her fencing.

“They’re the only space long enough and private enough at this school,” she’d said, bright spots of color on her cheeks, “and if you continue to snicker at me, I swear that I will tell your father you want a weekly lunch date with him to talk about your feelings.”

Tonight, the tunnel in front of us was empty. Our man was nowhere in sight. As I crept down the hall behind her, the lights above us flickered. Holmes’s shoes clicked against the floor, sounding like an insect tapping its legs together. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“He’ll have holed up here somewhere,” she said, a breath of sound.

“Should we start trying doors?”

She shook her head, putting up a finger. There were footsteps ahead of us, creeping ones. We were shifting gears from a chase to a slow, deliberate stalk, and I followed her as she slunk along, her eyes fixed on the ground.

She was following a trail he’d left on the linoleum floor, one I couldn’t make out through the dirt tracked in by that week’s workmen, the ragged lines from carts and trolleys. What was she tracing, I wondered, straining my eyes to see—and then I remembered. Why was he wearing four-hundred-dollar shoes? she’d asked the other night. Looking again, I saw the narrow tread of a dress shoe on the floor.

Silently, we followed his trail through the labyrinthine halls. The shouting of the police outside became a dull echo. Soon, I knew, they’d get ahold of the key code, and they’d be hard on our tail. Holmes knew it too. She roved the halls like a hunting dog. We were under the quad, now. The concrete walls were spotted with damp, and there was a smell in the air I knew from rugby practices. Mud. Wet earth. My mind wandered back to Highcombe School and its rugby pitch, to Rose Milton’s shining hair in the stands, her hands clasped together, my cleats tearing into the grass, and the sense that just this once, I was doing what everyone wanted me to do and doing it well—

Holmes flung a hand across my chest. “There,” she mouthed.

The door at the end of the hall, where the footprints ended.

Behind us, the unmistakable sound of a steel door slamming shut. The detective’s voice bellowing Holmes’s name.

“After you,” she said, with the smile of a hunter closing in on its prey.

She couldn’t have known what was behind that door.

She couldn’t have.

As I walked inside, Holmes followed on my heels. She let the door shut behind her, cutting off what little light we had. I groped for a switch, a cord, anything to help me see better, but all I found were shelves, rows of shelves, and the cool cinder block of the back wall. I pulled out my phone and clicked it on, using its dim light to sweep the room.

We were alone.

Somehow I’d known from the moment I stepped into the room that our man wasn’t going to be in here. Maybe I’d been unconsciously listening through the door for his breath, for some movement; maybe I knew enough about the way our luck worked. Maybe, deep down, I was relieved to not have to confront him. Whatever the case, it was only Holmes and me in there, and I was unsurprised to find us that way. Unsurprised, but not relieved. Not exactly.

We were alone in the killer’s lair.

Photographs of Dobson, before and after the fight we’d had—someone had taken a shot of him across the quad with one of those paparazzi cameras, so sharp that you could see the bruises I’d given him. A map of the tunnel system, blueprints for Michener Hall and Stevenson Hall. Dobson’s class schedule with classes highlighted and others crossed off, little notations written in beside them in Holmes’s crabbed, angry handwriting, and—Jesus Christ—pictures of Elizabeth laid out across the floor, a thick file with her name on it. I stooped to pick it up but stopped; Holmes had trained me too well to leave stray prints.

“Holmes,” I said. “That’s your handwriting.”

“I know.” Through the cloth of her dress, she lifted a T-shirt from the pile of clothes on the bare mattress on the floor. I realized that I recognized it; she recognized it too.

“That’s yours,” I said.